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Twitter, Google Maps Mashup Is Primitive Geolocation At Its Best

Maybe it’s not smartphone-enabled checkins that power this fun and informative Twitter app, but that doesn’t mean its version of “primitive geolocation” is any less sophisticated. With MapMyFollowers, you get a quick snapshot of where your followers live around the world, and access to some other interesting data too.

After you allow MapMyFollowers to access your Twitter account, you’ll be presented with a Google map of the world and those little red tacks to indicate where each of your followers lives.

Check out my map below:

I have lots of followers in North America, which makes sense as I live in Toronto, Canada. But I was happy to note some outliers in Japan, India, New Zealand… places I have never been, but clearly made a connection to someone online.

It’s neat to see where the bulk of your followers are from, but it’s potentially useful information for businesses looking to target new markets.

MapMyFollowers also offers some other, less flashy, but still interesting information about your Twitter followers. Because it’s pulling the Google Maps data from user bios, it has compiled a list of “Common Follower Terms” below the map that shows you what terms your followers use to describe themselves in their bios. Here’s mine:

“Social”, “Media”, “Writer”, “Web”, and “Marketing” are the biggest – indicating most repeated – terms among my followers, and it make sense. These are terms that I use to describe myself, and they pretty accurately describe my main areas of interest on Twitter.

MapMyFollowers is a simple app, but you can use it for some pretty powerful insight into where your followers are located and how they describe themselves. This in turn can be combined with other data to get an extremely clear picture of who’s following you.